by Bull, Rod;
At this point, we had had six bottles of wine and more was coming and still no food. The porno queen was oozing more and more. Wendy disliked her more and more. I was falling in love more and more. Suddenly Wendy started shouting, “All this woman is good for is fucking!” She kept on and on, the whole thing spinning out of control. I tried to defuse the situation by talking a lot of rubbish about American football, which I knew nothing about. This was making Mr. Brown mad, which was not a good thing. Sensing this through my drunken haze, I started to talk about rugby football, how it was more brutal, quicker, and interesting than American football. This pissed him off even more. What was I thinking?
Wendy got up to go to the bathroom, still muttering, “All she is good for is fucking.” I turned to Mr. Brown, saying I was sorry she was being such a pain in the ass. He stood right up, glaring at me with crocodile eyes, waving his finger and shaking his head. “I don’t give a fuck who you are, you don’t talk about friends of mine like that!” This statement struck me dumb and numb.
Still reeling, Wendy came back from the bathroom. She must have purged herself. She seemed much lighter, thank God. Things started to go a little more smoothly, and Mr. Brown invited us down to his place. Somehow I wove the car there. We stumbled into the apartment. Straight away, the porno queen started to strip, throwing herself all over Mr. Brown. He was trying to push her off saying, “Can’t you see I have company?” This was like water off a duck’s back. She just kept coming, undoing his shirt and then his fly. This was all too much. I had to get Wendy out before she started another scene. I thanked Mr. Brown for not killing me, and we left.
A week later, while visiting my friend who worked for a paper on Fleet Street, he told me that some American foot-ball star had thrown someone off a balcony. Jesus, I thought, that could have been me. The whole American thing had puzzled me for years. What was it with Americans? Everything in America was bigger and better. The ones I had met traveling were hard to take seriously. Could I believe them? The stories often did not match up. I thought I had better find out what all the hoo-ha was about. Wendy was visiting her parents on Long Island. I decided to go.
One of Wendy’s friends picked me up from J.F.K. He had a little MGB. It was tiny compared to the U.S. giants. Driving into Manhattan, we nearly disappeared down a giant pothole. Just stopping in time, John kept muttering something about the Mafia taking all the money that was used to fix the roads. Just great.
Manhattan was certainly different from London. Everything was at a much higher pitch, more intense. The yellow taxis were like angry wasps. It was July and very hot. The place was like a steaming cauldron. I stayed some of the time in Queens and some on Long Island.
John had friends in Greenwich Village who asked if I could help them paint their apartment. I finished the painting on a Saturday afternoon. They were having a party that evening and asked me to stay. This was my first real contact with the Village people. Gays, lesbians, artists, dancers, psychologists, bums. A star from one of Andy Warhol’s movies kept screeching at me, “I’m your trick!” What kind of trick? I thought. Maybe the vanishing trick.
We dropped some acid. The group psychiatrist wanted to take us on a tour of the clubs. The Snake Pit, the Tool Box, the Thrush, and the Stud, plus parties in the backs of trailers down on the docks. My head was spinning. I decided to take a walk on my own. The acid was giving me some strong trips. I got lost getting on the subway, it seemed like hours. Eventually I found my way back. I walked into the apartment and stopped dead in my tracks. It looked like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Naked, contorted bodies everywhere and every kind of sex act. It looked like a kind of hell. I didn’t know if it was the acid or me.
While staying in the States, I heard of a Gurdjieff group in New York City run by a Lord Pentland. An English lord running a Gurdjieff group in Manhattan—strange, but why not? Apparently this lord was a brilliant teacher. Also, his name was in the phone book and his office was in Rockefeller Plaza. I called him up, and we arranged to meet. This surprised me a bit, as usually they give you the runaround.
It was a July day, very hot. I had dressed up a bit so as not to look too much like a bum. This, of course, was dumb, as sweat was pouring off me. On arriving at Lord Pentland’s office, his secretary said he wasn’t there. This made me both relieved and angry at the same time, dressing up for nothing. The secretary said, “Wait if you like, he may show up.” I decided to wait. After a while, I needed to take a leak and also freshen up and wake up some, so I found the toilet. I was at the sink, looking in the mirror, when I saw a strange man staring at me. His eyes seemed to be flickering, his head moving up and down. Bloody homo faggot. Angrily I turned and stared at him. “Bugger off.” He just walked out.
Finishing up my strip wash, still muttering to myself about bloody fags never leaving you alone, I went back to the office. The secretary said, “Mr. Pentland is back and will see you.” The door to his office was open, but I could not see anybody. I looked past the door and—horror! My jaw dropped. There was the very man from the toilets. Stunned, speechless. He just looked at me with these big owl eyes, kind of nodding. Thinking, This is it, I started towards the door. “What do you want?” came a sharp voice.
Falling into a chair, I started stammering and stuttering and rabbiting on about how I thought the Gurdjieff movement had gotten distorted and egotistical. With Mr. Gurdjieff gone, there were not any conscious teachers to keep this in check. At one point I looked away and out of the corner of my eye saw this same eye rolling, flickering, nodding. Suddenly the area around my stomach and solar plexus did a flip. Turning, I asked, “What are you doing?” “You need to relax more. Come to 20 East 62nd Street at four o’clock Thursday and ask for me.” This was the end of our meeting, but the beginning of some amazing experiences.
John Pentland, as he liked to be called, was a brilliant teacher. He often used shock methods to wake people up. Once, the person sitting next to me asked a question. Pentland just screamed, “STAND UP.” The person asking the question didn’t stand up though, and after a pause, someone else said that it was an excellent question and why didn’t he answer it? Again Pentland screamed, “STAND UP.” The second person leapt to his feet. Pentland turned to the person who had asked the question, saying that if he had done what the second man just did, he would have answered the question himself.
I got friendly with one of the blokes in this group. He certainly put things into practice. One time Pentland mentioned that it would be a good idea to cut back on excesses of sex, alcohol, drugs, and maybe food. My newfound friend took this to heart, abstaining from sex, going on fasts. After several months he started to have some strange experiences—rays of light energy going in one eye, through the body, exiting through the other eye. He could see energy flows in others. After a while he thought he’d better talk to Pentland. “Go and get laid,” was Pentland’s answer. He was getting too attached to these experiences. This is what we find!
The subject of Chief Feature was always close at hand, one of the group saying to me that you are what your trouble is. You’re too apologetic for your existence. Bollocks! I thought, What the hell do they know? This should have been a warning sign, but being a chump, I blew it off. Apologetic for what? What were they talking about? Something was pricking me. There’s no doubt I’ve been a bit of a chump—what is it?
Weekends were often taken up with the construction of a house in Armonk, N.Y. for the Gurdjieff movements or dances, a very complicated set of actions done fast to Gurdjieff’s music. These were truly amazing dances. Often people who did them were transformed, taken to another level. People in their 70s looked like they were 21 again. On one occasion Madame de Salzmann, who basically took over Gurdjieff ‘s work when he died, was in Armonk. I was trying to get out of the hubbub and, finding an empty room, sat down to do some sensing exercises. Voices started to drift through the corridors, but I just kept sitting. The voices got louder and entered the room. It was Pentland and de Salzmann with a grou
p touring the new building.
Suddenly I felt a prodding in my side. My body lit up with a warm, blissful feeling. Swinging around to see who was prodding me, there 20 feet away was a smiling Madame de Salzmann. She kept smiling while walking straight by. She was an amazing lady, beaming like the sun, always speaking very naturally and simply.
For some reason they would not let me do the movements, probably because I was not focused enough. Later, in London, I found a group that would let me dance. This was a humbling experience, and I managed to learn only a few of the movements. I knew then why they did not want me to do them—I would have felt more like a chump.
Pentland had given my friend Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa to read. This had a big impact on him, and he gave it to me to read. It was a little over my head. My question was, is this sort of thing really possible to do in this day and age?
My stay in the USA was coming to an end. My visa had run out, so I had to go back to Old Blighty. I went to see Pentland about people he could recommend in London. He gave me a few names, which I thought were bogus. After some time, he said, “All right then, this is the person to see,” and he gave me the name and address of a lady in London.
Despond in Corfu
Arriving back in England, I was skint. How to make some bread?
I had a junkie friend staying with me at the time. He was always trying to get off the horse and coke, telling me to go and sell it, and with the money he would be able to get a flat of his own and a job. So, naively, I took the stuff to a contact I had in Marble Arch.
It was a huge house with Rolls Royce’s and Bentleys and Jaguars in the drive. Some place, I thought, wondering who these people were. The house was like a palace inside. They all seemed like people I had seen in the flicks. They loved the stuff, gave me the money. Taking it back to my place, I found my friend pacing around.
“Where’s my stuff?” he was saying. “You told me to sell it.”
“You fool!” he was shouting. “Where is it? Give it back!” I gave him the money.
“What’s this for?” “The dope,” I said.
“What! Get it back!” he shouted.
He started going crazy, saying the cops were surrounding the place, on the roof, in the basement. I tried to reason with him that there was no one out there. Nothing worked. Somehow we tracked down some horse and he was okay again. I was trying to be a do-gooder with no understanding of his situation, which was really stupid.
Photography was still something I was trying to pursue, but it was very competitive and difficult to get work. Plus, I was not that good. A friend who worked on Fleet Street said I should meet him at Alvino’s Wine Bar and try to hustle up work. We met a friend of his there who was starting a travel company in the Greek Islands. He needed photos of villas he was going to rent. I told him I had a lot of photos of buildings, which of course I did not, saying I would meet him in a few days. Before meeting him again, I shot a few rolls of buildings. He liked them and I got the job. He had just bought a new Jaguar, and we were going to drive down through Europe, Italy, and then by ferry to Corfu, stopping at a number of places along the way.
One night he wanted to stop in Naples, even though it was getting late.
We drove into Naples not knowing where we were going. Looking for signs, I ran straight into a Fiat, turning it into a banana. Italians get very excited about this stuff. Shouting and screaming, waving their arms. I looked around at my employer. He was just staring into space with his mouth open. His brand new Jaguar was banged up. But believe it or not, there was little damage and we were able to find a body shop to do the repairs. I thought at one point that we were going to be lynched, but my boss was able to pay people off.
It was early fall and still warm when we got to Corfu, with flowers still in bloom. This turned out to be my savior. Many of these villas were not finished, so I would take pots of flowers around with me, placing them where construction was going on, shooting through the leaves and flowers, hiding the areas under construction. This worked well—in fact too well, as some of these buildings were not finished in time for the tenants. The next year, I was back. Someone started shouting at me that the photos were misleading, particularly the one that was right at the end of the airport runway. He wanted to sue me for misrepresentation.
Stewart Wiley, the man I was working for, was an extremely cunning operator. He wanted to get beds in the Corfu palace. He wanted to arrive in grand style, docking at the wharf in front of the hotel. I would be photographing the grandeur of it all.
We started early one morning, but the boat we were to use would not start. We tried another, ending up having to use an old fishing boat. It was getting late and the boat was very slow. Stewart and his wife were dressed to the nines. It was getting very hot and they were both getting red in the face. He suddenly realized that we would not get there in time, as we were only doing around five knots. We could see the cars on the shore, making it look like we were not moving.
“Pull into the shore,” Stewart was shouting.
Trying to beach the boat was tricky. The beach was steep and the boat kept sliding back. Stewart jumped and the boat slid back, and into the water he went. Next his wife, the same thing happened. They were just standing there like drowned rats screaming at each other. We all ended up hitchhiking into Corfu. Very unheroic, but Stewart managed to get the beds anyhow.
There were other islands he wanted to see. He had a speedboat to cruise the islands. The local fisherman warned him against this, as the Med could get very wild very quickly. Stewart wanted to show off his new speedboat, so off we went, making a beeline for Paxos. As we rounded the headland, the swell got big. We were tossed around like a cork. I was trying to keep my cameras dry. As long as we headed straight into the swell, it was okay. But every so often we would slide sideways down the wave. Somehow we made it, again Stewart looking like a drowned rat, making both him and me a laughing stock, not to be taken seriously. Everything about this job was a problem. I was amazed the photos turned out okay. The whole thing ended in a huge row.
Dharma
Veronica Player was the name Pentland had given me. She knew many of the teachers in the Gurdjieff work and helped me try to understand the ideas, also giving me names of other people to see. She was looking into Tibetan Buddhism at this time, telling me about Samye-Ling in Scotland, started by Chogyam Trungpa and Akon Rinpoche. I decided to go have a butchers, to see what this Tibetan hoo-ha was all about.
Samye-Ling is in a remote part of Dumfriesshire in southern Scotland. The weather is usually bad—cold, rainy, or worse. Arriving early one morning, I could see that not much was happening. I tried to find somebody to ask where to go, see if anything was happening. No such luck. Wandering down to the river, I saw some huts in the woods and thought somebody might be in them. Nobody was about. Strange. Walking back to the main house, I heard a sort of mumbling, then a sudden cacophony of sound, like shrieking wails, drums and bells. Jesus, what the hell is it!
Making my way towards the weird sounds, peeking in the door, I found people sitting on cushions, some in maroon robes, with drums, long horns and bells, chanting very, very low. This all sounded like double Dutch to me. Not knowing any Tibetan, I just sat listening to the sounds of wails and the clashing cymbals. The strange thing was that after a while, my mind cleared. What was happening? The sounds had no melody or rhythm, just wails, screeches, and clashes. It sounded like they were scaring evil spirits away. It certainly scared my thoughts away.
I found out later that this was a Puja, a sort of prayer, and after it was over, I asked if I could speak with Akon Rinpoche. They told me he would be back the next day, as he lived in Dumfries, running a bed and breakfast with his wife and kids. This set me back a bit, thinking he would be some kind of celibate holy guru, not a family man. Meeting him the next day was also strange. He was very humble, saying very little. I asked him if there was some kind of exercises or meditation I could do. I told him I was going through a bit of a Sloug
h of Despond. Wendy, who I met in the ‘70s and became the mother of my kids, was in the States having a tumor removed from her breast. This was very worrying.
“Try to find your mind. Where does it stay? What color is it? Is it big or small?”
Thanking him for his help, I left, thinking this was pretty strange advice. I tried to do what he said anyway, not finding anything. Somehow it didn’t make any sense. There must be something in it, I thought. Trying to do this one day, and getting nowhere, Akon’s image came into my mind. Suddenly a channel between my head and my heart opened up. Amazing!
“Compassion, that’s what you need,” Akon would say whenever I asked him about my experiences. Funny, I thought I had compassion. The more you look, the less you seem to have. This whole “trying to find the mind” thing was a riddle—also a bit of a worry, as I could never find anything. Could this be the reason I was a bit of a chump? Maybe I was not looking in the right way or in the right place. Talking to some of the others, they had found the same thing—these endless thoughts, of-ten the same thoughts over and over. Boring, boring! Depressing. There must be something more. The puzzling thing for me was how in the Pujas, with all that awful din going on, the mind just settled, the thoughts slowed. Spaces appeared. Magic, truly amazing.
Samye-Ling was a strange place. Some of the people quite clearly had mental problems. Akon had the compassion to work with them, eventually curing them. One of these blokes thought he was the Buddha. We told him he couldn’t be—his ears were not big enough. This did not deter him.